Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France

For her commissioning and performance of a French vernacular version of the Arabic Tale of the Thousand and One Nights -- recorded in one of the most vivid and sumptuous extant late thirteenth-century manuscripts -- as well as for her numerous other commissions, Queen Marie de Brabant (1260-1321) was heralded as a intellectual and literary patron comparable to Alexander the Great and Charlemagne. Nevertheless, classic studies of the late medieval period understate Marie's connection to the contemporary rise of secular interests at the French court. Pleasure and Politics seeks to reshape that conversation by illustrating how the historical and material record reveals the queen's essential contributions to the burgeoning court. This emerging importance of the secular and redefinition of the sacred during the last decades of Capetian rule becomes all the more striking when juxtaposed to the pious tone of the lengthy reign of Louis IX (1214-1270), which had ended just four years before Marie's marriage to his son. That Marie often chose innovative materials and iconographies for these objects -- ones that would later in the fourteenth century become the norm -- signals her importance in late medieval patronage. Pleasure and Politics examines Marie's life beginning with her youth in Brabant, to her entry into Paris in 1274 and continues until her death in 1321. It analyzes the dynamics of her patronage and its impact on contemporary and future women and men of the royal house.